Scorsese saves the first dance

CLASSIC film The Red Shoes has been restored for a new generation of cinema-goers to enjoy.

The original print of the Oscar-winning British movie, which made an overnight star of 22-year-old Scots-born ballerina Moira Shearer, was badly damaged.

It has now been returned to its former glory using the latest ­cinematic technology.

The Red Shoes was called The Motion Picture Event Of The Year in 1948 and became a global hit.

Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, it tells the tale of a talented dancer scorned by an authoritarian ballet impresario when she falls in love with a composer.

UCLA Film & Television Archive and The Film Foundation have been working on the restoration project for three years.

Martin Scorsese, the 66-year-old US film director and chairman of The Film Foundation, said: “It would have been a tragedy if The Red Shoes had been lost for ever or even forgotten – it is a true gem of a movie. And one of our great classics which was loved throughout the world.

“It expresses so much about the burning need for art, and I identified with that feeling the first time I saw the picture with my father. I was so young then. It put me in contact with something in myself, a driving emotion I saw in the characters up there on the screen and in the colour, the rhythm, the sense of beauty.”

In the Forties Moira Shearer was compared to Margot Fonteyn and danced with Sadler’s Wells and later the Royal Ballet.

She won the heart of writer and broadcaster Ludovic Kennedy, whom she married in 1950.

In later years she took up directing, acting and writing, and defined herself in her Who’s Who entry as simply “writer”.

She died in 2006 at the age of 80.

Robert Gitt, of UCLA Film & Television Archive, explained that the film was badly damaged.

“The restoration combined the best of the past with our digital present,” he said. The Red Shoes in its restored version will be in cinemas in December.

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